Best Free Open Source Software For Windows

snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.

Comments

"Hover on the slideshow"...?

[Joce640k]

You could just list them in the summary - in less space than it takes to explain the "hover" trick

Best open source software for WINDOWS

[Junaos]

So obviously the answer is VirtualBox.

THEN Ubuntu.

Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur

[Brian Gordon]

I truly pity anyone who really thinks FileZilla is the best FTP client out there. Why don't more people worship The Perfection That Is WinSCP? :(

Re:paint.net?

[EvanED]

Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp.

"complexity of interface" is a pretty damn good thing to base a decision on.

I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.

When you have to look up documentation to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.

Re:Lisp in a Box

[dkleinsc]

Man, don't be dissing Lisp. Lisp is the foundation of a lot of the niftier concepts in lots of languages today, and is considered by most computer scientists to be one of the most perfect languages ever invented. Yeah, all those parentheses are a pain, but they consistently push you to do the Right Thing, and for me one of the highest complements I can place on non-Lisp code is "that looks almost Lisp-ish".

And if you don't believe me, believe these guys:
"The greatest single programming language ever designed." - Alan Kay
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - ESR
"LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers." - RMS
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun
"These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age." - Randal Munroe

Re:OpenOffice legendary?

[Enderandrew]

I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office. Including myself.

OO.o will:

* Export to PDF
* Import a plethora of formats that MS Office can't open.
* Export to Open Document Format (MS Office 2007 with SP2 will do this, but previous versions can't)
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions
* Run natively on Mac, Linux and Windows
* Doesn't cost a penny.

We pay $400 a pop for MS Office licenses here at work. Novell's Go-oo fork implements better macro support and such which is one of the few complaints I get about vanilla OO.o. So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?

What is your definition of hold its own?